Difficulty evaluating players performance

[nasd55]

Hi there guys,

I'm new to this game and very green to Baseball in general, i'm from Portugal and i have always been a fan of soccer, but in the last couple of years i have started to see the NFL and MLB, and i have been an avid football manager player for some 20 years.

My problem in OOTP is that i find it hard to understand how is the best way to see if a player is playing well or not, there are so many statistics that i don't really know what i should look for, in Football Manager every player is rated by is performance in every game and there are the assists and goals, in OOTP i don't really now what stats i should really be looking at for the Pitchers and the Batters, can anyone shed some light for me ?

Thank you in advance...

[Whoofe]

everyone will be different in how they evaluate players. i'll give you a very general idea, and I am sure others have more specific things they may believe in

for pitchers I look at ERA as a broad gauge, and WHIP as a more detailed look at performance

for hitters, OBP, SLG, or OPS are good numbers to look at- depending on what you expect from the lineup. leadoff hitters OBP is important, while middle of lineup SLG is a more typical stat to look at

[Whoofe]

traditional lineups usually something like this:
leadoff batter is good at getting on base and speedy
2nd/3rd batters are usually the best hitters. 3rd often with some power
4th batter typically called "Cleanup" is a power bat.
5th/6th are the best of the rest, while 7 thru 9 are the weaker hitters, some are your defensive specialists (catcher, 2b, ss), and in NL 9 spot is the pitcher

[DJP53916]

Three stats I tend to really look at for hitters is OPS (On Base Percentage + Slugging Percentage), OPS+ (100 = average. >100 = above average. <100 below average.) and games played.

If I am going to make a major signing or trade for a hitter, I want to know how well he gets on base, how he performs based on league average, and I want to know if I am going to spend big money in free agency or trade major prospects, the player I am targeting is likely to stay on the field to perform.

For starting pitchers, I look at WHIP, IP, K/9 and also K and BB (there is no K/BB ratio, but you can figure it out pretty easily just looking at both numbers). I want pitchers who generally limit baserunners, and I want durable pitchers who pitch well enough to stay in the game longer, so I don't overuse my bullpen. I completely ignore Wins and Losses. I only vaguely pay attention to ERA and ERA+.

For relief pitchers, I focus almost exclusively on WHIP, K/9, and the K and BB columns. For closers, I do look at saves a little bit, but generally won't acquire players based on this stat. I will try to use guys that get saves consistently as my primary closer, though.

[monkeystyxx]

The difficulty in baseball is, there's no one stat that tells you "this player has done well". Different players are there to do different jobs. Incidentally, it doesn't work that well in FM either. A player may have done brilliantly simply because he didn't do much, but did a tiny bit really well (Advanced Playmakers usually suffer from this. They'll put in a few key passes and get great ratings, while actually sucking hardcore at everything else. Just because he has a great rating doesn't necessarily mean he's helped the team all that much... but I digress.

There are a few key areas to look at for a few key players. Most people here have already covered most of them but I'll go over them again just to give you extra stuff to read.


Lead-off hitters (the #1 and #2 guy in your lineup) have one job: Get on base. This is most accurately displayed by their OBP stat (On Base Percentage - the percentage of the time they got on base in any way at all, whether via a hit, walk, being hit by a pitch, whatever). Anything over about .370 is good, the higher the better. Average is about .340.

#3 and #4 should be good hitters. You can't rely on EVERYONE walking, someone has to actually hit the ball at some point. Good AVG is key here (Batting Average, sometimes abbreviated to BA). Generally a guy with low AVG but high OBP should be higher up in the lineup. Anything from .270 upwards is alright. Sometimes a guy who hits a lot of home runs can get away with .250 and still be considered to have had a good season.
Good OPS is also useful. This is On Base Plus Slugging, and is basically your OPS added to your SLG. Thus it records not only the amount of times you got on base, but also the average number of bases you got to in one hit. .700 is about average, anything near 1.00 or higher is awesome. Below .600 is poor, unless they're a shortstop or something (and even then it's pushing it...)

From there, #5-#9 is basically just in order of how well they hit (so put guys with higher OPS first).

There are several other nuances, like mixing up righties and lefties so that a right handed batter follows a lefty in the lineup where possible to limit any one relief pitcher having an advantage against chunks of the lineup. Or the ongoing debate over whether an NL pitcher should bat 8th or 9th. But that's more advanced, and of dubious worth.


Then of course, it depends on the player's position in the field. If you're playing a team in the AL, you'll have a designated hitter. He ONLY bats, he never fields (some of them will play first base, or other positions, but not regularly). Therefore he should, in theory, have the best OPS on the team. This almost never happens, but in THEORY...

Baseball has a 'spectrum' of fielding positions. The idea is that the more challenging a fielding position is, the less crucial that player's batting performance is, because he has a bigger role to play on defence. So for example, a good defensive shortstop with a mediocre bat is MUCH more valuable than a good defensive left fielder with a mediocre bat. The spectrum goes, from toughest to easiest:

Catcher, Shortstop, Second Base, Center Field, Third Base, Right Field, Left Field, First Base.

This doesn't mean that your second baseman will naturally be a worse batter than your right fielder. It just means that it doesn't matter as much if he is, because he has more of an important job to do defensively.

Personally, I think third base is probably the position where offense becomes more important. I would take a good, reliable defensive shortstop with a mediocre bat over a mediocre defensive shortstop with a good, reliable bat. Same for a catcher (obviously) or a second baseman. I would not take a good defensive third baseman over a good bat at third base, assuming the good bat wasn't absolutely Alvarez-level bad.

But like I said, what counts as 'good' depends on their job on the team and their position on the field.

"Good" OBP will be higher for your leadoff-hitting right fielder than it will for your shortstop batting 8th.

Also bear in mind At Bats and Plate Appearances. You can't really tell anything from the stats until you get to around 200PA, and the more PA a player gets, the more reliable the stats are. If your perennial All-Star has a .200 OBP after 50 plate appearances, you probably don't want to worry quite yet. Baseball is very luck-dependent, that's why there are so many games.

After/near the end of the season, you can use WAR as a good basis for who's done well. Anyone with a negative WAR has had a bad season by any measure. Anyone over about 4 has done really well. Anyone over 6 has had a great year. Guys with around 8+ are league-leading all-stars, 10+ is legendary.

Unfortunately, WAR isn't an average, so it will build up over the season. Guys who were injured for a large part of the season won't have as high a WAR as guys who played the whole season and did pretty well, even if the injured guy was really good when they were healthy. So even that isn't a be-all and end-all measure.


tl;dr version: If you really want to compact it down to ONE stat that you can look at to determine how well a hitter is playing, use OBP. It's probably the best overall.


As for Pitchers, it's slightly easier because they're only really there to do one thing: get guys out. ERA and WHIP are the go-to stats for most pitchers.

ERA is Earned Run Average, simply the average number of runs the pitcher gives up averaged per nine innings. Note that almost no pitchers in the modern game will actually pitch 9 innings in a game. So an ERA of 4 does not mean he gives up an average of 4 runs per game, it'll be slightly less than that for starters. For the same reason, it's less useful for relief pitchers because they pitch so few innings per game compared to a starting pitcher that giving up a few runs will completely destroy their ERA. For a starting pitcher, an ERA of 4.00 is generally considered average. Your 'ace' (the best pitcher on your team) should generally be under 3.00, under 2.50 is preferable for the best pitchers. Anyone over 5.00 is having a bad season. Again, this is for STARTING pitchers only, and make a note of the innings pitched. As with Plate Appearances for hitters, the numbers can be very skewed under 50IP. Before making a judgement on whether a pitcher is good or not, it's best to wait for 100IP (for starting pitchers).

For relief pitchers, WHIP is much more useful (Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched). While ERA measures the number of earned runs scored against your pitcher, WHIP measured how many walks and hits he gave up - how many guys he let get on base. ERA can sometimes be unfair to a pitcher, WHIP is more of a damning comment on their ability, because if a batters walks, it's THEIR fauilt. If a batter gets a hit, it's (usually) THEIR fault.

A WHIP under 1.0 is phenomenal. Between 1.0 and 1.2 is where most of the best pitchers sit. 1.4ish is average. Over 1.5 is pretty bad.

Also note OPS+ and ERA+. The '+' indicates that these values are compared to the league average. Over 100 is above average, under 100 is below average (these are normalised, so that higher is always better, even though normally a higher ERA is worse). So if your pitcher has an ERA+ over 100, he's done better than the league average pitcher. Normally, you'd expect your top pitchers and batters to be 30-40 points over average (so 130-140). 150 and above means they've done exceptionally well.


Also, utilise Splits. Along the top of your Players screen, just above the column headings, you'll see lots of dropdowns. One of them is Splits. In there you can change the ratings that are shown. For example, if it's currently the first week of July, you can set the split to June and see how all of your players did last month. This might give you an idea of how's in form right now, but don't make the mistake of getting rid of players who are not doing well in any given month. Some players will just have bad patches of form. You can set the split to Last Week, too, for an even more recent and even less accurate view of what's going on.

You can use Double Splits too, for really specific searches. How did a player do in April during Night games? Who cares? But you can find out!


Aaaand this post is far too long now.

[TGH-Adfabre]

I'm new to this game and very green to Baseball in general,

I would turn scouting off or set accuracy to 100%. The game can be difficult enough to learn when the numbers you see are correct. Once you are competent you can make the information obscured.

[DJP53916]

Originally Posted by TGH-Adfabre

I'm new to this game and very green to Baseball in general,

I would turn scouting off or set accuracy to 100%. The game can be difficult enough to learn when the numbers you see are correct. Once you are competent you can make the information obscured.

I would highly recommend following this suggestion.

[endgame]

Originally Posted by TGH-Adfabre

I'm new to this game and very green to Baseball in general,

I would turn scouting off or set accuracy to 100%. The game can be difficult enough to learn when the numbers you see are correct. Once you are competent you can make the information obscured.

With an unsolicited , I'll add that under the new evalutation and scouting algorithms at work in v17, I am strongly considering moving my league to a scouting accuracy of Very High from the Low and/or Normal I've utilized for a long time. Even at Very High, there are uncertainties, but it has proven a fairly good mix of accuracies and gambles, even for the new user, IMHO. Not a disagreement, only an opinion.

[nasd55]

Thank you guys for the great answers, they will help a lot, it's nice to see a good community helping out the new guys

[nasd55]

Originally Posted by monkeystyxx

The difficulty in baseball is, there's no one stat that tells you "this player has done well". Different players are there to do different jobs. Incidentally, it doesn't work that well in FM either. A player may have done brilliantly simply because he didn't do much, but did a tiny bit really well (Advanced Playmakers usually suffer from this. They'll put in a few key passes and get great ratings, while actually sucking hardcore at everything else. Just because he has a great rating doesn't necessarily mean he's helped the team all that much... but I digress.

There are a few key areas to look at for a few key players. Most people here have already covered most of them but I'll go over them again just to give you extra stuff to read.


Lead-off hitters (the #1 and #2 guy in your lineup) have one job: Get on base. This is most accurately displayed by their OBP stat (On Base Percentage - the percentage of the time they got on base in any way at all, whether via a hit, walk, being hit by a pitch, whatever). Anything over about .370 is good, the higher the better. Average is about .340.

#3 and #4 should be good hitters. You can't rely on EVERYONE walking, someone has to actually hit the ball at some point. Good AVG is key here (Batting Average, sometimes abbreviated to BA). Generally a guy with low AVG but high OBP should be higher up in the lineup. Anything from .270 upwards is alright. Sometimes a guy who hits a lot of home runs can get away with .250 and still be considered to have had a good season.
Good OPS is also useful. This is On Base Plus Slugging, and is basically your OPS added to your SLG. Thus it records not only the amount of times you got on base, but also the average number of bases you got to in one hit. .700 is about average, anything near 1.00 or higher is awesome. Below .600 is poor, unless they're a shortstop or something (and even then it's pushing it...)

From there, #5-#9 is basically just in order of how well they hit (so put guys with higher OPS first).

There are several other nuances, like mixing up righties and lefties so that a right handed batter follows a lefty in the lineup where possible to limit any one relief pitcher having an advantage against chunks of the lineup. Or the ongoing debate over whether an NL pitcher should bat 8th or 9th. But that's more advanced, and of dubious worth.


Then of course, it depends on the player's position in the field. If you're playing a team in the AL, you'll have a designated hitter. He ONLY bats, he never fields (some of them will play first base, or other positions, but not regularly). Therefore he should, in theory, have the best OPS on the team. This almost never happens, but in THEORY...

Baseball has a 'spectrum' of fielding positions. The idea is that the more challenging a fielding position is, the less crucial that player's batting performance is, because he has a bigger role to play on defence. So for example, a good defensive shortstop with a mediocre bat is MUCH more valuable than a good defensive left fielder with a mediocre bat. The spectrum goes, from toughest to easiest:

Catcher, Shortstop, Second Base, Center Field, Third Base, Right Field, Left Field, First Base.

This doesn't mean that your second baseman will naturally be a worse batter than your right fielder. It just means that it doesn't matter as much if he is, because he has more of an important job to do defensively.

Personally, I think third base is probably the position where offense becomes more important. I would take a good, reliable defensive shortstop with a mediocre bat over a mediocre defensive shortstop with a good, reliable bat. Same for a catcher (obviously) or a second baseman. I would not take a good defensive third baseman over a good bat at third base, assuming the good bat wasn't absolutely Alvarez-level bad.

But like I said, what counts as 'good' depends on their job on the team and their position on the field.

"Good" OBP will be higher for your leadoff-hitting right fielder than it will for your shortstop batting 8th.

Also bear in mind At Bats and Plate Appearances. You can't really tell anything from the stats until you get to around 200PA, and the more PA a player gets, the more reliable the stats are. If your perennial All-Star has a .200 OBP after 50 plate appearances, you probably don't want to worry quite yet. Baseball is very luck-dependent, that's why there are so many games.

After/near the end of the season, you can use WAR as a good basis for who's done well. Anyone with a negative WAR has had a bad season by any measure. Anyone over about 4 has done really well. Anyone over 6 has had a great year. Guys with around 8+ are league-leading all-stars, 10+ is legendary.

Unfortunately, WAR isn't an average, so it will build up over the season. Guys who were injured for a large part of the season won't have as high a WAR as guys who played the whole season and did pretty well, even if the injured guy was really good when they were healthy. So even that isn't a be-all and end-all measure.


tl;dr version: If you really want to compact it down to ONE stat that you can look at to determine how well a hitter is playing, use OBP. It's probably the best overall.


As for Pitchers, it's slightly easier because they're only really there to do one thing: get guys out. ERA and WHIP are the go-to stats for most pitchers.

ERA is Earned Run Average, simply the average number of runs the pitcher gives up averaged per nine innings. Note that almost no pitchers in the modern game will actually pitch 9 innings in a game. So an ERA of 4 does not mean he gives up an average of 4 runs per game, it'll be slightly less than that for starters. For the same reason, it's less useful for relief pitchers because they pitch so few innings per game compared to a starting pitcher that giving up a few runs will completely destroy their ERA. For a starting pitcher, an ERA of 4.00 is generally considered average. Your 'ace' (the best pitcher on your team) should generally be under 3.00, under 2.50 is preferable for the best pitchers. Anyone over 5.00 is having a bad season. Again, this is for STARTING pitchers only, and make a note of the innings pitched. As with Plate Appearances for hitters, the numbers can be very skewed under 50IP. Before making a judgement on whether a pitcher is good or not, it's best to wait for 100IP (for starting pitchers).

For relief pitchers, WHIP is much more useful (Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched). While ERA measures the number of earned runs scored against your pitcher, WHIP measured how many walks and hits he gave up - how many guys he let get on base. ERA can sometimes be unfair to a pitcher, WHIP is more of a damning comment on their ability, because if a batters walks, it's THEIR fauilt. If a batter gets a hit, it's (usually) THEIR fault.

A WHIP under 1.0 is phenomenal. Between 1.0 and 1.2 is where most of the best pitchers sit. 1.4ish is average. Over 1.5 is pretty bad.

Also note OPS+ and ERA+. The '+' indicates that these values are compared to the league average. Over 100 is above average, under 100 is below average (these are normalised, so that higher is always better, even though normally a higher ERA is worse). So if your pitcher has an ERA+ over 100, he's done better than the league average pitcher. Normally, you'd expect your top pitchers and batters to be 30-40 points over average (so 130-140). 150 and above means they've done exceptionally well.


Also, utilise Splits. Along the top of your Players screen, just above the column headings, you'll see lots of dropdowns. One of them is Splits. In there you can change the ratings that are shown. For example, if it's currently the first week of July, you can set the split to June and see how all of your players did last month. This might give you an idea of how's in form right now, but don't make the mistake of getting rid of players who are not doing well in any given month. Some players will just have bad patches of form. You can set the split to Last Week, too, for an even more recent and even less accurate view of what's going on.

You can use Double Splits too, for really specific searches. How did a player do in April during Night games? Who cares? But you can find out!


Aaaand this post is far too long now.

ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC POST, loved it, explained so much and so well, thank you so very much

I have next week off and i can see myself having a nice binge on this game, at least until the wife throws something at me, eheheheheheh